With a store in Europe they can provide faster delivery times of Paparazzi UAV hardware for all the European users and developers. Now you can purchase Lisa/M(X), Lisa/S, Elle0 autopilots and accessories for Paparazzi UAV within Europe without having to pick up your order at your customs office. We hope this will make the entry into Paparazzi and working with the system easier, knowing that you can get new parts and hardware faster from a local supplier.

With the coming of the new year we decided it was time for a refresh of the appearance of the Wiki front page. Stripping away its colorful design and removing the boxes around text we thought it would help make the information cleaner and easier to read. We have added new icons to help clarify how you can best connect with the community and where to find what you need.

We hope people like the new look of the Wiki and find navigating it to be an easier experience, as always new contributions are welcome. Happy flying everyone!

For those of you who have never heard of the Chaos Communication Congress, it is a hacker conference that takes place every year between Christmas and New Year’s Eve in Germany. For many years it was held in Berlin, but with the increased attendance a larger venue was needed, it is now being held in Hamburg, Germany.

Most people arrive in Hamburg on the 26th of December for day 0 of the conference. We met our assembly in the large Hackcenter hall. EZ who helped organize lodging for a lot of us also found and reserved tables for us. Usually it was the CCC organizers who were reserving the tables for the so called Assemblies. This time they did not do that for any Assembly with less than a 100 members. This shows how big the event is getting.

During the conference we spent a lot of time talking about the future of the Paparazzi project, and making plans for how we can improve things. We had quite a busy table with 30 Paparazzians and friends. People were assembling their airframes and flying them for the medias amusement. We were interviewed by ARTE, the French German culture TV station and a few other media outlets. We are not sure when and where our footage will air, but we will post it here when it does. If you see it on TV, please let us know. 🙂

As always Felix (our tireless maintainer) was very busy merging and improving the Paparazzi UAV codebase. One of the more exciting developments is the improved python ivy bindings. Making the implementation of ground agents in python easier. Additionally, stay tuned for some awesome announcements from Hooperfly who organized his own CCC hackathon in Portland, OR as he could not make it to the real thing.

We also met a lot of old friends, from projects like Sigrok and UAVP-NG. As well as making new connections to projects like Yosys and IceStorm. Formally verified FPGA based autopilots anyone? 🙂

As always, an event like this is incredibly inspiring and productive. We hope you will join us next year to be part of the event.

We will keep you posted if there are any other events where you can meet other Paparazzians. And also let us know if you know of any Paparazzi related events or meetups worth mentioning here, just drop us an email at: press at paparazziuav.org

ENAC UAV Lab team and Meteo-France (CNRS-GAME and ENM) teams have spent several days at the Atmospheric Research Center of Lannemezan (in the south of France) in order to perform experiments for simultaneous meteorological measurements through multi-UAV flight.

This was part of a research project called VOLTIGE aimed at studying the formation of cloud and fog events. One of the planes is measuring the turbulence near the ground, a second plane is flying above the cloud or the fog with a radiation sensor and the last one is making a vertical profile of temperature, pressure and humidity up to 1500 meters AGL.

All the planes were controlled by Paparazzi UAV Apogee boards, with on-board logging on SD cards and navigation patterns triggered by sensors readings.

This year we will be having another meetup at the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress (32C3) in Hamburg, Germany. The event is happening from December 27th to 30th, 2015. Make sure to secure your tickets! When you are in the area, find us and say hi! We will have our Assembly there and will have lot’s of cool hardware and people with us. See you there! 😀

Mechanically Elle0 is designed around the 30.5mm M3 hole pattern, popularized by the Nano Quad community. But Elle0 can be used on more than just Nano Quads, it has everything on board to control anything from a small Quad through a big Octocopter to Airplanes or Helicopters. For an autonomous UAV you just need to add a GPS, Telemetry radio and maybe RC receivers. 😉

Researchers from the GMEI/MNPCA have recently returned from a one month field measurement campaign at the weatherstation of Mace Head in Ireland.
Their report was very positive with more than forty scientific flights, up to 3350m above sea level, some of them synchronized with ameteorological satellite overpass, for the study of interactions between clouds and aerosols.
Several unmanned aircraft, equipped with the Paparazzi UAVsystems, have been used, carrying meteorological, aerosol, cloud and 3D wind sensors.
A bungee was used for taking-off, while a big net was needed inorder to recover the planes, since the ground was not suitable for traditional landings.
This campaign was part of the BACCHUS project (Impact ofBiogenic versus Anthropogenic emissions on Clouds and Climate: towards a Holistic UnderStanding).